Obviously something of this magnitude will have blindspots. This tech tree seems to be vastly underselling the impact of advances in metallurgy and precision machining. As well as most of what you might call "basic science".
This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere, not depending on any previous technology
They tried to define what they mean by technology [1], but they seemingly gave up on it partway through. Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list.
The inconsistent definition and the pretty large gaps leads to a lot of oddness. Just look at how sparse anything related to textiles is. "Clothing" just gets one "invention" in 168k B.P., even though a t-shirt and an arctic jacket are obviously very different technologies. New world agriculture is similarly strange. Nodes appear from nowhere and lead nowhere, presumably because there are implicit "nature" edges they didn't want to represent as technology.
Feel like if you're doing something like this you should just basically maximalize your definition. The fun here is seeing all the nodes, obviously!
Maybe then you get into arguments about whether the dependencies were "required", but there it's more or less resolvable by relying on what "actually" happened rather than the minimal tree (which is its own exercise)
> Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list.
This is an interesting example. It's a technology that's very important for staying alive, but not one that you'd expect to contribute to any kind of progress. It's just something you have to do to corn before eating it.
I'm a former archaeologist, so my personal definition of technology is extremely expansive.
You don't actually need to nixtamalize maize. It's totally edible without and most americans today don't eat nixtamalized corn outside masa. It's just a process to make it more nutritious and importantly, nearly nutritionally complete. For ancient societies, nixtamalizing had a role similar to things like vaccination do for us today. It reduced malnutrition and the economic/social/political effects of disease. The difference I'm trying to highlight is that it probably wasn't understood as such and intentionally done for that purpose. Nixtamalization was culturally encoded as just what you did. Had they had a better understanding of nutrition, they probably would have made more intentional efforts to include the missing vitamins nixtamalization doesn't provide. We often see signs of those missing nutrients in precolumbian skeletons.
This extends to a surprisingly wide variety of ancient technology. Most metallurgy probably wasn't understood in the technical sense we think of it today until quite late. We see that with early glass, where people simply didn't understand what they were doing. Ingredients from specific areas would have specific effects, but sometimes didn't for reasons no one at the time understood. Craft communities would standardize on very specific, ritualized processes that simply couldn't be changed because they didn't have a good mechanistic understanding of the variables involved. One of the downstream effects of this is that poaching craftspeople is a viable strategy (they had the specific "recipe") and also that resources like sand from specific areas in syria and egypt were effectively non-fungible for centuries. You had to trade with whoever controlled that area even if you had the craftspeople.
Andrew Carnegie wrote that one of the things that gave him an advantage over other steel manufacturers was that he hired a chemist to test ore for iron content.
By implication, this was something that had never been done before.
A lot of those things are incremental improvements that build onto each other, like refining an alloy by a few % many times over to end up with something entirely different.
How would one determine what is sufficiently different to deserve a node?
But 100% agree, incremental improvements are the vast majority of advances.
My particular interest is in screw cutting lathes, and it appears that the Wikipedia entry[1] (on which this seems to be based) was off by about 25 years (1775 instead of 1800), and thus copied to this work. I've let the folks at Wikipedia know.
Interesting. On that note, Da Vinci's design (which I was fortunate enough to see a replica of at a local museum) was also very clever, being suited not only for screw cutting but also screw origination, as it could make new screws more accurately than the two leadscrews in the machine itself, and swap them out to improve its own accuracy. But I suppose it doesn't extend that date even further back because it wasn't a general purpose lathe, it could only cut screws.
Have you ever thought about how alien lifeforms would probably invent screw cutting lathes too? The screw feels like such a "human thing", but what else would serve the rotational wedging purpose in this universe's elements and physics?
It would be funny to think of what might actually be a human thing. Like, our arms are quite weird, right? So potentially another intelligent species even on a rocky planet might not invent throwing spears, right? Even our close relatives, the chimpanzees, can’t use them well at all. Even fairly flighty animals seem to barely have the idea that a creature standing, like, tens of feet away from them might be “in range.”
I wonder what the trajectory (no pun intended) of the development of melee spears would be, without throwing spears.
The spear being a wildly popular a successful weapon for almost all of history, any changes to spears would, I guess, make a big difference.
I find this video of theirs the most relevant [0] where they go through how to start on a desert island and build a flat reference plate using the three plate method and the build up from there
Additionally I've always wanted institutions to be part of the timeline of technology. Corporations, Nation-states, Universities, Guilds, International Organizations - the ways people innovatively organize make things possible that otherwise wouldn't be.
The higgs boson experiments, for example wouldn't have been possible without the complex international institutions that orchestrated it. Manhattan project, Moon landing, the internet ... the iphone ...
I wonder if something similar could be added here where I say something like "what's the most important descendant of x" and it would bring me to that tech and give me a little explanation of why
If you like this then you will probably enjoy the book How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by cartoonist and computer-scientist Ryan North.
This 2D map is hard to explore since it's so sparse. I have to follow lines to find each thing, since it's 99% empty void. Is there a snap to next item hotkey? Am I just doing it wrong?
It's interesting that prior to the industrial revolution there are still some periods where it seems like innovations arrived relatively fast, and others where it was comparatively slow. E.g. a lot more entries are in the 500 BCE - 200 BCE period than the 200 - 500 range.
Although the idea of a "Dark Age" is mostly debunked these days, the slow unraveling of the Western Roman Empire led to a real and sustained change in material conditions. Notably, population density and urbanization both decreased, along with the labor specialization that accompanies them. I'd expect most 'inventions' to happen when and where people have the most hands on time to make them! (I can't really speak to Indian and Chinese civilizations, but they have also had integration and disintegration periods)
Beautiful! I wonder if Jimmy Maher's heard about this; he wanted something like it for The Analog Antiquarian back ages ago before he kicked that off, as a way of reflecting the span of history in the structure of the index/TOC, but we never could figure out really how to get it to go anywhere we liked. It's a surprisingly tricky problem, and this is an impressive realization!
This is cool, but I think the execution is off because there's so much empty space. I think it would work better if the nodes were much smaller and closer together so you can see more of the graph in one screen.
Highly recommend the Dr. Stone anime if you're interested in a story with the premise of starting civilization from scratch but armed with the sum total of modern human knowledge about science and engineering.
Also, if you want even further back precedent for this kind of plot device, I highly recommend reading a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court by Mark Twain.
I'd also recommend the Destiny's Crucible series - the basic premise is that a chemist from our world is transported to another planet of humans at a much lower technological level, and some moderately standard isekai hijinks ensue.
I read five of the books, and really enjoyed them; if you like the "competence porn" genre of novels, this is a pretty good one.
See... now, I love that type of show/comic/book/etc. And now that I have a name for it, I want to search for more. But I very much do _not_ want to search for that term. Lol
I second this. It's the only show I've seen making a semi-realistic attempt at this (ignoring the absurdity of the initial petrification in the first place and Dr. Stone having superhuman knowledge of all human inventions)
I watch this with my daughter and we love it. I love shows with "narration", talking about the context/details of things, and Dr Stone really nails that (I know the main character isn't really a narrator.. but it accomplishes the same thing).
It's funny that there are so many innovations right now the recent part of the chart just has to arbitrarily exclude an insane amount of stuff innovation that's happening.
No HIV vaccine. mRNA vaccine get's a single entry instead of vaccine per disease like prior vaccines. No battery stuff since 1985. Just amazing, fractal improvement is everywhere.
Great phrase - fractal improvement. It's kind of the idea of this book [0]
Even more cool: commercial progress trails tech. It takes a long time for companies to figure out how to turn a new idea or a cheaper input into a new product/industry, and then for related companies to grow into an economic ecosystem.
So one would expect to see some spectacular economics over the next couple of centuries.
Its a great start! Bound to have bias and blindspots. It would be cool to run an agent that could incrementally enrich this knowledge graph. Take some modern day technologies and backtrace the components and their development.
Obviously something of this magnitude will have blindspots. This tech tree seems to be vastly underselling the impact of advances in metallurgy and precision machining. As well as most of what you might call "basic science".
This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere, not depending on any previous technology
They tried to define what they mean by technology [1], but they seemingly gave up on it partway through. Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list.
The inconsistent definition and the pretty large gaps leads to a lot of oddness. Just look at how sparse anything related to textiles is. "Clothing" just gets one "invention" in 168k B.P., even though a t-shirt and an arctic jacket are obviously very different technologies. New world agriculture is similarly strange. Nodes appear from nowhere and lead nowhere, presumably because there are implicit "nature" edges they didn't want to represent as technology.
[1] https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/what-counts-as-a-technology
Feel like if you're doing something like this you should just basically maximalize your definition. The fun here is seeing all the nodes, obviously!
Maybe then you get into arguments about whether the dependencies were "required", but there it's more or less resolvable by relying on what "actually" happened rather than the minimal tree (which is its own exercise)
> Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list.
This is an interesting example. It's a technology that's very important for staying alive, but not one that you'd expect to contribute to any kind of progress. It's just something you have to do to corn before eating it.
I'm a former archaeologist, so my personal definition of technology is extremely expansive.
You don't actually need to nixtamalize maize. It's totally edible without and most americans today don't eat nixtamalized corn outside masa. It's just a process to make it more nutritious and importantly, nearly nutritionally complete. For ancient societies, nixtamalizing had a role similar to things like vaccination do for us today. It reduced malnutrition and the economic/social/political effects of disease. The difference I'm trying to highlight is that it probably wasn't understood as such and intentionally done for that purpose. Nixtamalization was culturally encoded as just what you did. Had they had a better understanding of nutrition, they probably would have made more intentional efforts to include the missing vitamins nixtamalization doesn't provide. We often see signs of those missing nutrients in precolumbian skeletons.
This extends to a surprisingly wide variety of ancient technology. Most metallurgy probably wasn't understood in the technical sense we think of it today until quite late. We see that with early glass, where people simply didn't understand what they were doing. Ingredients from specific areas would have specific effects, but sometimes didn't for reasons no one at the time understood. Craft communities would standardize on very specific, ritualized processes that simply couldn't be changed because they didn't have a good mechanistic understanding of the variables involved. One of the downstream effects of this is that poaching craftspeople is a viable strategy (they had the specific "recipe") and also that resources like sand from specific areas in syria and egypt were effectively non-fungible for centuries. You had to trade with whoever controlled that area even if you had the craftspeople.
Andrew Carnegie wrote that one of the things that gave him an advantage over other steel manufacturers was that he hired a chemist to test ore for iron content.
By implication, this was something that had never been done before.
They are expecting suggestions for this work in progress.
https://www.historicaltechtree.com/about#contributing
A lot of those things are incremental improvements that build onto each other, like refining an alloy by a few % many times over to end up with something entirely different.
How would one determine what is sufficiently different to deserve a node?
But 100% agree, incremental improvements are the vast majority of advances.
[dead]
My particular interest is in screw cutting lathes, and it appears that the Wikipedia entry[1] (on which this seems to be based) was off by about 25 years (1775 instead of 1800), and thus copied to this work. I've let the folks at Wikipedia know.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-cutting_lathe
Interesting. On that note, Da Vinci's design (which I was fortunate enough to see a replica of at a local museum) was also very clever, being suited not only for screw cutting but also screw origination, as it could make new screws more accurately than the two leadscrews in the machine itself, and swap them out to improve its own accuracy. But I suppose it doesn't extend that date even further back because it wasn't a general purpose lathe, it could only cut screws.
Have you ever thought about how alien lifeforms would probably invent screw cutting lathes too? The screw feels like such a "human thing", but what else would serve the rotational wedging purpose in this universe's elements and physics?
It would be funny to think of what might actually be a human thing. Like, our arms are quite weird, right? So potentially another intelligent species even on a rocky planet might not invent throwing spears, right? Even our close relatives, the chimpanzees, can’t use them well at all. Even fairly flighty animals seem to barely have the idea that a creature standing, like, tens of feet away from them might be “in range.”
I wonder what the trajectory (no pun intended) of the development of melee spears would be, without throwing spears.
The spear being a wildly popular a successful weapon for almost all of history, any changes to spears would, I guess, make a big difference.
Making sure you've seen this youtube channel, which is excellent: https://www.youtube.com/@machinethinking
I find this video of theirs the most relevant [0] where they go through how to start on a desert island and build a flat reference plate using the three plate method and the build up from there
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58
Super Easy Improvement: add thousands separator. It's easy to mistake 1,500,000 BC with 150,000 BC.
Also zoom in/out would be super useful!
Great idea though!
Discussed once (and I do mean once):
Historical Tech Tree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44104243 - May 2025 (1 comment)
Source code found here : https://github.com/etiennefd/hhr-tech-tree
https://github.com/etiennefd/hhr-tech-tree/blob/main/src/scr... this is kind of how I expected it. Honestly I would have done https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ and then parsed it.
Additionally I've always wanted institutions to be part of the timeline of technology. Corporations, Nation-states, Universities, Guilds, International Organizations - the ways people innovatively organize make things possible that otherwise wouldn't be.
The higgs boson experiments, for example wouldn't have been possible without the complex international institutions that orchestrated it. Manhattan project, Moon landing, the internet ... the iphone ...
This is awesome. I worked on a 'conversational historical timeline generator' a little bit ago: https://timeline-of-everything.milst.dev/
I wonder if something similar could be added here where I say something like "what's the most important descendant of x" and it would bring me to that tech and give me a little explanation of why
If you like this then you will probably enjoy the book How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by cartoonist and computer-scientist Ryan North.
https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/
This 2D map is hard to explore since it's so sparse. I have to follow lines to find each thing, since it's 99% empty void. Is there a snap to next item hotkey? Am I just doing it wrong?
A tech tree without metallurgy roots is like building a spaceship with no screwdriver—looks cool, but it’s gonna fall apart fast.
Related: The Universal Tech Tree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161607
It's interesting that prior to the industrial revolution there are still some periods where it seems like innovations arrived relatively fast, and others where it was comparatively slow. E.g. a lot more entries are in the 500 BCE - 200 BCE period than the 200 - 500 range.
Although the idea of a "Dark Age" is mostly debunked these days, the slow unraveling of the Western Roman Empire led to a real and sustained change in material conditions. Notably, population density and urbanization both decreased, along with the labor specialization that accompanies them. I'd expect most 'inventions' to happen when and where people have the most hands on time to make them! (I can't really speak to Indian and Chinese civilizations, but they have also had integration and disintegration periods)
This site is an absolute gem. Thank you.
I dunno man. Surely this is the sort of thing that it makes sense for a historian to do (they don't tend to like this sort of approach).
Beautiful! I wonder if Jimmy Maher's heard about this; he wanted something like it for The Analog Antiquarian back ages ago before he kicked that off, as a way of reflecting the span of history in the structure of the index/TOC, but we never could figure out really how to get it to go anywhere we liked. It's a surprisingly tricky problem, and this is an impressive realization!
This is cool, but I think the execution is off because there's so much empty space. I think it would work better if the nodes were much smaller and closer together so you can see more of the graph in one screen.
where is the zoom functionality??
I'd expect something things like Chinese Writing to be a big upstream dependency, but here it's a terminus. Detecting a western-bias in the sourcing.
Such as?
Does anyone know which technology on this tree has the most descendents?
I vibe coded with gpt-5 and the source json (https://www.historicaltechtree.com/api/inventions) to get this list:
Top 10 inventions by number of direct descendants
1: High-vacuum tube — 13
2: Automobile — 12
3: Stored-program computer — 12
4: Voltaic pile — 11
5: High-pressure steam engine — 11
6: Glass blowing — 10
7: Papermaking — 10
8: Bipolar junction transistor — 10
9: Writing (Mesopotamia) — 9
10: MOSFET — 8
Top 10 by total descendants (direct + indirect)
1: Control of fire — 585
2: Charcoal — 444
3: Iron — 422
4: Iron smelting and wrought iron — 419
5: Ceramic — 404
6: Pottery — 402
7: Induction coil — 389
8: Raft — 365
9: Boat — 363
10: Alcohol fermentation — 353
Top 10 by total ancestors (direct + indirect)
1: Robotaxi — 253
2: Moon landing — 242
3: Space telescope — 238
4: Lidar — 236
5: Satellite television — 231
6: Space station — 228
7: Stealth aircraft — 228
8: Reusable spacecraft — 224
9: Satellite navigation system — 224
10: Communications satellite — 224
Highly recommend the Dr. Stone anime if you're interested in a story with the premise of starting civilization from scratch but armed with the sum total of modern human knowledge about science and engineering.
Also, if you want even further back precedent for this kind of plot device, I highly recommend reading a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court by Mark Twain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_A...
I'd also recommend the Destiny's Crucible series - the basic premise is that a chemist from our world is transported to another planet of humans at a much lower technological level, and some moderately standard isekai hijinks ensue.
I read five of the books, and really enjoyed them; if you like the "competence porn" genre of novels, this is a pretty good one.
> "competence porn"
See... now, I love that type of show/comic/book/etc. And now that I have a name for it, I want to search for more. But I very much do _not_ want to search for that term. Lol
I think a similar genre is "humanity fuck yeah" - HFY - so you can search for that as well.
I second this. It's the only show I've seen making a semi-realistic attempt at this (ignoring the absurdity of the initial petrification in the first place and Dr. Stone having superhuman knowledge of all human inventions)
I watch this with my daughter and we love it. I love shows with "narration", talking about the context/details of things, and Dr Stone really nails that (I know the main character isn't really a narrator.. but it accomplishes the same thing).
I'd also recommend the "How to Make Everything" YouTube channel.
This version of Sid Meier's Civilization would take ages to play.
Cool concept. I’d love a vertical version for mobile.
It's funny that there are so many innovations right now the recent part of the chart just has to arbitrarily exclude an insane amount of stuff innovation that's happening.
No HIV vaccine. mRNA vaccine get's a single entry instead of vaccine per disease like prior vaccines. No battery stuff since 1985. Just amazing, fractal improvement is everywhere.
Great phrase - fractal improvement. It's kind of the idea of this book [0]
Even more cool: commercial progress trails tech. It takes a long time for companies to figure out how to turn a new idea or a cheaper input into a new product/industry, and then for related companies to grow into an economic ecosystem.
So one would expect to see some spectacular economics over the next couple of centuries.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp...
Looking forward to the new Civilization mod that uses this.
Very cool! Will explore it a bit :)
have always wanted something like this! awesome!!
Its a great start! Bound to have bias and blindspots. It would be cool to run an agent that could incrementally enrich this knowledge graph. Take some modern day technologies and backtrace the components and their development.
Reminds me of the tech tree featured in the game Civilization. Pretty cool stuff
And a related page, in the other direction: https://www.futuretimeline.net/
In what sense related?
No fire, and no knot. Hmmm...
Yes there is: "control of fire". No knots, but ropes around 50000 BCE.
"Control of Fire" is right under 1000000 BC
Ok, I'm just bad at search.
This is really cool but hard to view well on a PC. I'd love to have a simplified version of this on a big A2 poster.
Pretty cool. Makes me think if we're overdue for another 1960s era tech boom?
1760000 BC: StoreTool 3. This is our greatest model yet. You are going to love it.
These paradox games are getting out of control